Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  “Wow!” Joe says. “I didn’t know birds were so devious.”

  Devious, Caruso thinks. The gall of the man.

  “No, just bored.” Clarissa jumps in to defend him, and Caruso feels grateful for this scrap of support.

  “Animals are a mystery to me,” Joe says. “We never had pets when I was a kid. Mama thought they were dirty. Last summer, I stayed with a family in Mexico that had a lot of pets, but I wasn’t there long enough to really get into their heads.”

  “And you…” she begins cautiously. “Do you feel like your mama does about animals?”

  “Not really,” Joe says after a brief silence. “I don’t think they’re dirty, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You might change your mind if you experienced a molt. Now, that’s a mess. Sheaths, powder dust, and feathers all over the floor. Those little pinfeathers are sharp when they come in. They drive Caruso crazy. So I remove the sheaths off those he can’t reach since he doesn’t have a mate to do it for him.”

  “It must feel itchy, like growing a beard.”

  “Uh-huh. He’s miserable and cranky.”

  “Poor guy,” Joe says, as though commiserating with him. “He’s way too proud to put up with that.”

  “See, you’re getting into your best buddy’s head,” she says.

  “Like when I finally understood the eccentricities of my family really weren’t that weird.”

  Joe will never understand his family of birds, Caruso thinks.

  “Speaking of eccentric families—when would you like to meet them?” Joe asks her.

  “Soon,” Clarissa replies, “but, you know, I can’t leave Rick at the height of the season.”

  “At the end of summer then?”

  “I’d love that,” she says.

  Rattled, Caruso stiffens on his perch. She wants to meet his family—another step to the altar, he thinks, his legs shaking, his heart slamming against his chest. Suddenly, his anguish is so pure, his sense of prophecy so vivid, that they override his need to be in control, and, forgetting himself, he recklessly yanks out a feather—one in full view, from the center of his breast. Why is he doing this? he puzzles. In his secret heart of hearts, does he want her to find him out? Is he willing now to settle for her pity?

  Sixteen

  A week later, she is pulling out his poop tray when she spots one of his perfectly formed wing feathers, which he plucked out yesterday. She finds another from his belly, a dozen from his shoulders, and five more from his breast until there is a nest of them in her palms.

  “Caruso,” she says, holding her hands up high, parting them. “My poor darling,” she says as the feathers cascade like dandelion fluff to the floor. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she looks guiltily at him. “I didn’t know you were so unhappy,” she says as she uncoils the wire from his cage door.

  Her pity confuses him even more, and he emits a long, protracted cry. “Sad Caruso,” she says, drawing the door open and presenting her arm to him. He steps up, his toes uncertain. She brings him out into the sunroom, turning him this way and that, her azure blue eyes scrutinizing his body, her hard stare belying the tenderness in her face. “What’s this little spot on your breast?” she says, studying him carefully, then lifting his right wing. “Not under here,” she mumbles to herself. She lifts the other wing and gasps. “My sweet boy, you’ve been busy, haven’t you?” she says, concerned. She taps her shoulder, and he wobbles up the slope of her arm. She purses her lips for a kiss, but he holds back.

  “Goodness, look at the two of us,” she says. “Both of us acting like strangers. It’s Monday. How about we spend a little time together?”

  He answers her with a blank, watery stare.

  “We’ll take a bike ride, drop by Biff’s, and see Beryl.”

  He remains still and silent.

  “I’m calling Joe right now. Gonna tell him I’ll see him tomorrow. Today, I’m all yours.”

  She returns him to his cage and pads down the hallway to the living room. He can hear her muted voice as she speaks and wonders if she’ll keep her promise, but, true to her word, they leave soon after she hangs up.

  When they pedal by a young woman in a sundress and an older man in cut-off jeans, Caruso can’t decide if the two are friends or lovers. Nothing is clear to him these days. Except the cloudless, white sky. The sight of Silver Lake Harbor glimmering in the distance momentarily lightens his spirits, and he feels a reprieve from the sadness engulfing him lately—but then he hears a car horn blasting as a bright red convertible passes, almost forcing them off the road into a clump of southern sweet grass. He is unsettled again. “Damn dingbatters!” she says, jerking the handlebars to the right, regaining control.

  They cycle on. In the library parking lot, three of the local boys are playing a game of Ringer, reminding Caruso of the old man’s stories about his marble-shooting days. As usual, they wave at him, but this morning Caruso feels too low to flap his wings back. More cars pass, heat rolling off their fenders. The crape myrtles, all abloom, look like pink-flowered sunbonnets, but, though bright and cheerful, they don’t delight Caruso like they used to.

  Clarissa takes a few more turns, and presently they are cycling along Silver Lake Drive toward Biff’s Dockside Store. In the harbor, the seagulls are shrieking behind the shrimp boats coming in to dock. Their voracious, insistent cries annoy him. All his life, he has snubbed this no-count bird. Moochers, wastrels, thieves, he calls them. Every seagull he has ever known was like this—the black-headed gulls digesting the putrid leftovers of men’s meals in garbage dumps; the greater black-backed gulls stealing the eggs of razorbills and plovers from their nests on the edges of cliffs; all of the lazy seagulls swooping down to freeload on any escaping fish from the baggy bills of brown-feathered pelicans after they’ve surfaced.

  When he first came to Ocracoke, Clarissa had read Jonathan Livingston Seagull to him every night. How he grew to resent the goody, two-web-footed Jonathan, bravely risking failure to make his dreams come true! He would have preferred a book about a cockatoo, and if not a cockatoo, then some other parrot—or even an oystercatcher, if she wanted the protagonist to be a seabird; at least the oystercatcher is industrious enough to do his own fishing, probing his long, orange beak into mud flats for mussels and then using it to smash their shells into pieces.

  Watching the seagulls now, circling and screeching, Caruso thinks he might have judged them too harshly. Perhaps they’re simply screaming for a little extra attention. Perhaps they feel rejected by the world, too. Lately he wants to throw a tantrum, yell and scream and cry like the seagull, like the little girl next door, but he does not dare because his powerful voice would drive the neighbors to distraction. And if they complained too much, Clarissa might be compelled to give him up.

  One day, Caruso had looked on as Ruthie stomped on her mother’s prized heirloom hollyhocks until she got the Popsicle she demanded. He could do the same with his beak—could blackmail Clarissa by wreaking destruction with it—but he tried that once with Theodore Pinter, who, without a word, had calmly retrieved the stuffing from the sofa pillow that Caruso had demolished and then ignored him. For three long days, the old man had shunned him, refusing to communicate with him in any way. Bored and lonely, Caruso had been forced to think about his bad behavior, ultimately replacing it with more subtle methods of manipulation.

  “You’re getting my undivided attention today,” Clarissa says, slowing down as she veers onto the weather-beaten pier, the wheels of the bike thunking over the warped planks. At the entrance to Biff’s, she comes to a stop. Kicking down the stand, she straddles off the seat and holds out her arm to him. He ascends to her shoulder, his heart definitely not in this visit. She skids open the pocket door. “Hey, girl,” she says, poking her head inside.

  “Hey, you,” Beryl says, glancing up from the Jacksonville Observer next to the cash register.

  “It’s freezing in here,” Clarissa says, sliding the door shut.

 
“I know. I set the air conditioner on high. I best cut it off for Caruso,” she says, coming out from behind the counter.

  “See how much Beryl loves you,” Clarissa says.

  “When ya gonna introduce me to your fella?” Beryl asks, the noisy rumble ceasing when she switches the unit off.

  “Why, Beryl, you’re looking right at him,” Clarissa says, winking at Caruso, who crosses over her arm to the counter.

  “And a very handsome fella he is, indeed,” Beryl adds, scooting rapidly back to her spot beside the cash register.

  “Not for long, if he keeps plucking out his feathers.”

  “I don’t see any feathers missing.”

  “Look under here,” Clarissa says, the muscles in her jaw tightening as she lifts up his left wing. “Did most of his plucking where I wouldn’t be able to see it.”

  “Nastysome,” Beryl says.

  “Here’s another spot,” she says, pointing at his breast with her pinkie.

  Embarrassed, Caruso bows his head.

  “I had no idea,” Clarissa says, “until I found the feathers at the bottom of his cage.”

  She has no idea about anything, Caruso thinks. For he constantly hides his true self from her. He plays the role of her clownish cockatoo, tirelessly climbing the bars of his cage, or turns himself into Rip Van Cockatoo after she goes to sleep. He is her thoughtful cockatoo, refraining from grinding his beak at night, so as not to wake her. Her grateful cockatoo, pretending to like the bland parrot pellets in his food dish. He keeps the instincts of his species in check—reining in his shrieking, never destroying her possessions with his beak, not once flying off, though he could if he chose to. He is always the companion bird—never the companion.

  “He’s never plucked before,” Beryl says, scraping a fleck of oil paint off her middle finger with her thumbnail. “Why now?”

  “It must be Joe,” Clarissa says bluntly. “The vet in Wilmington gave him a clean bill of health just a few months back.”

  Caruso’s mind drifts off, looking for solace in memory. After their visit with the avian vet, they had taken a lovely stroll along the river walk. “Fisherman’s stew,” she had said, stopping in front of a little bistro, breathing in. “Snapper,” she said, with another noisy whiff, “lots of garlic, tomatoes, wine, and…what’s that?” She sniffed again. “Fennel,” she answered with a smile.

  They moved on, halting beside a wrought iron fence around a Spanish-style patio. She held up his carrier cage and pointed. “Look over there near the gate. They’re eating she-crab soup. Smells luscious, doesn’t it?” Then she pointed to the table in front of them. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “That’s not shrimp salad. That’s sculpture on a plate.” Caruso eyed the shellfish. From a bed of watercress, the shrimp rose upward like a staircase. There were swirls of orange sauce around the plate. He remembers how much her enthusiasm had delighted him, how thrilled she was to see art on a plate.

  Before this morning, she thought him magnificent. As beautiful as a statue by Rodin, she once told him. Now he has defiled his body with his beak. A bedraggled cockatoo, he is, his feathers ruffled this way and that.

  “He’s jealous,” Beryl is saying when he comes back.

  Yes, jealous, Caruso admits, with a long, despondent caw.

  “Clarissa, did you hear that?” Beryl asks her. “He cawed like a crow.”

  A murder of crows. An unkindness of ravens, Caruso thinks. In no time, he’ll be crying like a grackle—the saddest call of all.

  “I heard him.” Clarissa sighs. “Lately he confounds me, and I’m coming to my wit’s end.”

  The two of them fall into a deep silence.

  “I love to work with my hands,” Caruso remembers her saying that day months ago as she had leaned against the wharf railing and had looked out over the river. “I like to feel the glossy skin of an onion beneath my fingers when I slice it. To snap broccoli florets off their stems. To mince plump cloves of tangy garlic. I like to taste mashed potatoes, soft as clouds on my tongue. To admire the texture of tomato aspic, sleek as a frozen pond. I like the smooth, clean crack of an egg when I break it against a bowl and the muted thump of a wooden spoon inside an iron skillet.”

  Upon hearing those words, he’d winced, envisioning himself as an egg in a nest of soft shavings in the hole of a gum tree, his parents keeping him warm and safe from hands like hers, casually cracking his shell against a bowl.

  “I like to decorate plates with red nasturtiums and the sugar-frosted petals of a light-pink rose,” she went on. “I like to create art on a plate. Work is what makes us happy, Caruso,” she had said. “It makes us human.”

  At this moment, it dawns on Caruso that joblessness might be his problem. After all, he is a bird who has worked hard to make Clarissa happy, and now this is Joe’s job.

  With a quick snap, Beryl smashes a bluebottle fly lighting on her newspaper. Startled, Caruso jerks back. “Sorry, Caruso,” she says as she scoops up the fly with the edge of the swatter. “I just can’t stand—hey, Clarissa, look here,” she says giddily. “Here’s the answer to your problem.” She draws her finger beneath a line of bold print and shifts the paper around for Clarissa to read it. “Right here,” she bubbles.

  “You think?” Clarissa says with an upward glance.

  “What do you have to lose?” Beryl says. “Go ahead and give them a call. You can use the phone in Biff’s office. He won’t mind.”

  Clarissa takes the classifieds with her to the back of the store.

  The Great Mother will sacrifice a fly to help Clarissa, Caruso thinks, but won’t sink a surfboard and smash it into bits for him.

  “You’re a genius,” Clarissa says, emerging a few minutes later. And then, before Caruso can squawk good-bye, they are dashing out the door, pedaling along Silver Lake Drive, and weaving down Fig Tree Lane toward their once-cozy cottage.

  “I know I promised to spend all day with you,” she says, unlatching his cage door. “I know I promised to give you my undivided attention, but something has come up.”

  Another broken promise, another betrayal, he thinks, slumping down on his perch.

  “I’m taking the ferry to the mainland, and when I come in tonight, I’ll have a great big surprise for you.”

  A great big surprise, Caruso thinks with a doubtful squawk. What could it be? he wonders. Why must she go all the way to the mainland to get it? His bag of parrot pellets is almost full, and she buys his seeds and peanuts here at Styron’s. So why the mainland? Does she want to pick some willow twigs for him to gnaw on? He loves them, but willows don’t grow on this tiny island. Or maybe she wants to buy him a gift of gum nuts, which can only be found in Wilmington.

  “No feather plucking while I’m gone,” she orders him. “Remember, Caruso, you’re my main man,” she coos before hurrying out the door.

  The car sputters and grumbles as she backs out the drive. Is he really her main man? he thinks, his gaze inadvertently landing on the cage door. For the first time in days, she didn’t wrap the thick rope of wire around it. Perhaps she trusts him, he thinks, remembering what the old man had said after the shunning was over and Caruso had learned how to control his destructive beak. “Love, Caruso, blooms in the wake of trust,” he had told him. Staring at his cage door, free of the wire rope, Caruso wants to believe that love is abloom, once more, in the wake of her newfound trust.

  Seventeen

  Caruso hears footfalls in the yard beyond the upraised window. It’s late afternoon, not quite sunset, when the heat has bullied its way into every living and nonliving thing. Who could it be? he wonders as feet thump up the wooden steps. The back door whines open, and Caruso freezes.

  “Caruso, it’s me—Beryl!”

  She didn’t have to say her name, he thinks, her familiar voice putting him at ease.

  “Came to see how you’re doing,” she says from the doorway.

  He greets her with a flap of his wings and a squawk.

  “No way for Clarissa to drive to Camp L
ejeune and back and not have to take the last ferry,” she says, moving toward him.

  She went where? he thinks.

  “You aren’t plucking, are you?” she asks, eyeing him from crown to tail.

  He vehemently shakes his head.

  She unhitches the cage door and peers inside. “No loose feathers and still plenty of food. How about some fresh water?” she asks him as she slips the container from its holder. She shuts him in and starts toward the kitchen.

  He hears her twisting on the faucet, then hears water pinging against the metal bowl. She cuts the flow off and comes back. “Nice and cool,” she says, opening his door, sliding in his water dish.

  He lowers his head for a neck rub, and she obliges him with a paint-smudged finger.

  “Powder dust,” she says, raising her finger to her mouth, blowing the white film off. “It’s everywhere,” she says, glancing around. “Clarissa is definitely not into cleaning.”

  He bobs his head.

  “Why don’t I do a little dusting,” she says. “Keep you company for a while. Kill two birds with one stone.”

  That aphorism is disturbing, he thinks with a shiver.

  She latches his cage door and disappears into the kitchen. Several cabinet doors bang before she shouts triumphantly, “Hey, I found the polish!” She begins with the painted chest, dousing her rag with polish, vigorously buffing the top, until it sparkles spinach-green. After that, she moves on to the table and shines its base and legs and the two chairs beneath it, followed by the chaise longue’s oak frame. “Dust free,” she says, her tone pleased.

  For the life of him, Caruso doesn’t understand why she attacked his powder dust with such a vengeance. For he has observed sparrows, through these very same windows, flapping their wings as they bathed in the dusty driveway to rid themselves of parasites.

  Without warning, the back door opens with a rasp. “Clarissa, you home already?” a voice shouts.